Conceived in aluminum in 1958 and cast in bronze by Reussner & Donzé in an edition of 3, numbered 1/3-3/3. The present work is number 1 from the edition and was cast circa 1976. Edition 2 of 3 currently resides at the Kantonsspital, St. Gallen.

Jean (Hans) Arp was instrumental in the shaping of both Dada and Surrealism. His early studies brought him to the Kunst Schule in Weimar and the Académie Julian in Paris before settling in Munich in 1912. At this time he exhibited with Der Blaue Reiter and at the outbreak of WWI fled to Switzerland, where he met his first wife and fellow artist, Sophie Taueber (Arp). Arp started a Dada group with Max Ernst and Alfred Grünwald in Cologne, where autonomous drawing and writing and chance encounters were fundamental to their practices. Returning to Paris, he participated in the first Surrealist exhibition held at the Galerie Pierre in 1925 and was later part of the Paris-based group Abstraction-Création.

Arp’s work traverses multiple avant-garde movements of the 20th century and different media, shifting between geometric and organic forms. In 1954, he received the Grand Prize for Sculpture at the Venice Biennale. In 1957, he was commissioned to do a sculptural work for UNESCO for the decoration of their Paris headquarters. In that work, copper elements are suspended from a wall and, according to the artist, hang freely “like hats that could be picked up.” The present work was created as a variation of Arp’s work on the UNESCO Constellation.